William Kingdon Clifford Quotes
Every rustic who delivers in the village alehouse his slow, infrequent sentences, may help to kill or keep alive the fatal superstitions which clog his race.
A little reflection will show us that every belief, even the simplest and most fundamental, goes beyond experience when regarded as a guide to our actions.
We may always depend on it that algebra, which cannot be translated into good English and sound common sense, is bad algebra.
This sense of power is the highest and best of pleasures when the belief on which it is founded is a true belief, and has been fairly earned by investigation.
No simplicity of mind, no obscurity of station, can escape the universal duty of questioning all that we believe.
When an action is once done, it is right or wrong for ever; no accidental failure of its good or evil fruits can possibly alter that.
The harm which is done by credulity in a man is not confined to the fostering of a credulous character in others, and consequent support of false beliefs.
An atmosphere of beliefs and conceptions has been formed by the labours and struggles of our forefathers, which enables us to breathe amid the various and complex circumstances of our life.
If a belief is not realized immediately in open deeds, it is stored up for the guidance of the future.
He who truly believes that which prompts him to an action has looked upon the action to lust after it, he has committed it already in his heart.
To know all about anything is to know how to deal with it under all circumstances.
All our liberties are due to men who, when their conscience has compelled them, have broken the laws of the land.
There is one thing in the world more wicked than the desire to command, and that is the will to obey.
The scientific discovery appears first as the hypothesis of an analogy; and science tends to become independent of the hypothesis.
Thought is powerless, except it make something outside of itself: the thought which conquers the world is not contemplative but active.
We feel much happier and more secure when we think we know precisely what to do, no matter what happens, then when we have lost our way and do not know where to turn.
Our lives our guided by that general conception of the course of things which has been created by society for social purposes.
It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.